A family of five move from Australia to Argentina trying to blend in like locals. The kids are learning Spanish, he's teaching English and she's doing a psychology degree. Sounds like fun to me.

Friday, 23 June 2017

Brick by brick.

The winter winds have arrived with
such strength that we hung the washing out after sunset yesterday and by
morning everything was cold but dry. A
few minutes in front of the heater and everything was ready to be put away. The weather changes so dramatically here. At the start of the week, when Indy arrived
at school it was -2. Then by mid-week,
the temperature was in the low teens.

The majority of homes here are
built using a red ceramic brick and then covered in render. Larger buildings have concrete columns poured
and then the bricks are used to create the walls. We’re not sure how they are secured in place
but we are thankful that we don’t experience earthquakes in this part of
Argentina. In some of the poorer parts
of town, extensions are added onto houses using just bricks held together with
mortar. The main problem with this style
of building is that there is no insulation and the walls become extremely cold. Our bedroom is above the garage and the exterior
doors face the prevailing winds, which means that our floor is ice cold in the
mornings. You can forget the floor is
lava, the floor is a glacier is a far more dangerous game. Every
morning we leap from our bed, via a series of pillows, to the hallway where the gas heater is
just so we don’t suffer from frost bite. In spite of the cold floor the house is very comfortable and we are thriving here.

Depp continues to soak up the
Spanish all around him.The other day,
as I was arriving home from work, the following conversation happened…

Further to this, a few days later
a friend had dropped off some boxes with toys, kitchen utensils and other
things she no longer needed. When Depp
came home from school and saw the boxes he was still in Spanish mode and
started speaking to Talluah in Spanish, “Mama,
look at the boxes. Three boxes with
toys. Are they all for me? Who brought the boxes?” Then he started naming the toys inside and
the books.